


Three Universes Allison Argent Never Got to Visit

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Demigods, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/M, Werewolf Allison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 03:32:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the heart of the Hale Woods, there's a copse of enchanted trees. It's all very Nightmare Before Christmas, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Universes Allison Argent Never Got to Visit

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Cecilia, Kiby, and Laria, who each asked me for a respective Teen Wolf AU, so I decided to combine their prompts together into one fic :D We have a Teen Wolf at Hogwarts AU, a Teen Wolf as demigods AU, and the AU where Allison was the one bitten by the werewolf.
> 
> This is all mostly gen, with some Scott/Allison and one implied Scott/Allison/Isaac. It's probably worth mentioning that I've only watched bits and pieces of Teen Wolf after season one, so some characterization has been gleaned entirely from fic, la la la :D
> 
> **Warnings** for Kate Argent and all that she implies.
> 
> Can be read here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/122949.html).

-

 

In the heart of the Hale woods, there's a copse of enchanted trees.

It's not anything obvious, not really, but a werewolf would know it's there, and even the average observant human or two would probably stop and look around, overcome by a feeling that doesn't have a name -- a feeling like being watched in the woods, an aloneness that doesn't have anything to do with loneliness. Hales have lived on this land for time out of memory, in one form or another, since before wolves even dreamed of humans with a human name.

Here, the trees grow close together -- in some places, branches overlap and leaves blur into a gradient of greens and browns.

They say that a tree can contain an entire universe. Touch the trunk of one, and know that galaxies spin beneath the bark with colossal slowness. Pick up a leaf off the ground and trace the genetic map of worlds in its veins. A tree lives a hundred lives.

They're right, of course.

Universes begin and end in the enchanted trees in the old Hale woods.

 

**the first tree: a greenspire linden**

 

The morning she leaves, Aunt Kate comes in and puts her wand down on the bathroom counter and does Allison’s hair by hand. Allison will never admit it (she probably doesn’t have to, her father does private security for wizarding functions and as such is the most accomplished Legilimens she knows, besides maybe her mother,) but she loves it best when Aunt Kate braids her hair by hand, because her mom usually does them and spells them too tight, so she has a headache by lunch.

Aunt Kate’s dressed to go out in the Muggle world, in a short black skirt and long corduroy jacket pulled over it with the belt synched tight, headphones snaking out of her pocket up to her ears. Her knee-high boots have bright silver buckles on them. They look too hot for September weather.

"Are you coming with us?" Allison asks curiously.

"I got errands of my own to run," Aunt Kate answers, smiling at her in the mirror. "Besides, I think your parents want you to themselves before you go off and they don’t see you for four whole months."

Allison rolls her eyes at that, because she’s sure her parents are going to be _fine._

When her braids are done, they go down and sit together on the bottom step, which is too narrow for both of them to fit comfortably, even if Allison is pint-sized for an eleven-year-old. Aunt Kate lets her share an earbud with her, because, "you’re going to be without the Internet until Christmas, babe, you better get your fill of the Muggles’ finest to tide you over," and so Gorillaz chants in one ear and Allison drums her foot against the edge of her trunk.

Aunt Kate regards her solemnly. "Is there anything you want to ask me?" she probes. "I know your dad’s full of advice, but I was at Hogwarts a lot more recently than he was."

Allison fidgets, and in the brief lull before the music switches tracks, she blurts out, "Do you remember the Battle of Hogwarts?"

Her aunt’s eyebrows go up, but she nods without hesitation. "Yes," she says. "That was ... Merlin’s beard, that was almost ten years ago. I was a third year. Why?" She squints thoughtfully. "Are you nervous?"

She doesn’t say anything, and Aunt Kate sighs, pulling her in close so Allison’s head rests against her shoulder.

She strokes her hair and says, "There’s honestly no safer place to be, okay? And you know that at the first sign of trouble, your mum will Summon you back to us so fast you’ll probably break Hogwart’s wards zooming across the countryside."

Allison giggles.

"There you go," Aunt Kate’s mouth curves in the corner, and she squeezes her tight. "You’ll be fine, baby girl. Hey, think fast: what’s the best House?"

"Slytherin!"

"Good girl. Of course you’re allowed to go wherever you want to go, I’m not saying you shouldn’t make up your own mind, but Slytherin House is only for the best and you --" she touches the end of Allison’s nose with a fingertip. "Are the best."

"I know," Allison answers primly, and laughs when Aunt Kate hugs her close again, hard enough that she feels like a puppy, the one everybody wants to pet and hold.

"Can you promise me something?"

"What?"

Aunt Kate’s eyes sparkle. "When you come home at break, _promise_ me the first bit of magic you’re going to do is levitate your dad in the middle of Christmas pudding. String him right up by the ankle."

Allison has no idea when she’s going to learn the spell for levitation, but she crosses her heart and promises anyway.

Eventually, her parents come downstairs, dressed in the Muggle clothes they saw on the front of a rock magazine once, and Allison says good-bye to Aunt Kate, who tells her to "knock ‘em dead, babe," in her phoniest accent, before her mother takes her arm and her dad takes her trunk and they Apparate away.

~*

Allison has several Argent cousins currently enrolled at Hogwarts; her parents _and_ Aunt Kate remind her that this means she won’t be alone at school, because they’ll look out for her and hex anybody who tries to mess with her.

She finds them on the train and sits with them, but she can tell immediately that if she’s looking for companionship, she’s doing it in the wrong place: other than a "hey" when they first recognize her, they largely ignore her, drifting off to hang with their own groups of friends. Allison scrunches up in her seat and cracks open one of her new spellbooks, getting maybe four paragraphs into the introduction before she loses interest and takes to staring out the window as they leave the last of London behind.

She isn’t surprised. Most of the Argents moved base to the Cayman Islands for tax evasion reasons when she was much younger, so she only saw her cousins during the holidays, their hair highlighted and their skin wholesomely tan.

They still send their kids to Hogwarts, of course, because they’re still British and it’s tradition.

She falls asleep as the sun goes down, waking up when they pull into Hogsmeade and she has to hurriedly pull on her robes and join the other first years gathering on the platform, rounded up by a sour-faced young man with a lantern hoisted up high. Everybody tries to avoid standing too close to him, because he’s eyeing them hawkishly, the way people do when they don’t have a lot of experience with small children.

"We’re going to get turned into toads and then we’re going to _die,"_ whimpers a boy to Allison’s right. 

She tries to smile at him, because she’s pretty sure human-to-animal Transfiguration for the purpose of eating is still cannibalism and therefore illegal, but the kid on his other side elbows him.

"Wouldn’t that be _awesome?"_ he goes in a low, delighted hiss, while the groundskeeper counts them. Even in the low platform lighting, Allison can see his fingernails are coated with a rim of grime. "If that was the initiation test we have to take? I’ve never been a toad, I wonder what it’s like. Come on," he goes, when the boy next to him looks dubious. "Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to ribbit if you had the opportunity!"

The boys continue their discussion in that vein, stopping only when the little boats glide out around the bend and they see their first glimpse of Hogwarts, which looks like any other castle Allison’s dad would take her to so he could show her how to weave protective wards together to make a shield, except _bigger._

She thinks they might be a little disappointed when Professor Flitwick comes out and tells them that the Sorting Hat will be choosing their Houses for them, like they really had worked themselves up to believe they were going to have to survive their first week at Hogwarts as toads.

Squeakily, Professor Flitwick calls her name up to the Hat first.

_Hmmmm,_ goes a little voice, snug in her ear, as she settles herself on the stool, hooking her feet around the rung. _Hello, Argent._

"Hat," Allison returns respectfully.

_I’ve Sorted your entire family into Slytherin, you know, dating all the way back to when I was but a young and sprightly thing._

"I know. Can I go there, please?"

_Are you sure?_ The Hat sounds, if anything, thoughtful. _The same way every family has something they don’t want seen in their cellar --_

She startles, because how can the Hat know that? Even Allison technically isn’t supposed to know that, but Aunt Kate’s never been particularly subtle about the auras of the things she brings back to the estate; even when she’s in her room, some of those items are malevolent enough to make her grit her teeth until one of the adults strengthens the protective charms on the cellar door again.

_\-- every person has something hidden inside of them, too. There might be another House where you could belong._

Allison considers it, peeking out at the tables from underneath the brim. Nobody looks actively hostile or actively welcoming: mostly everybody just looks hungry. She lets the brim fall.

"Thanks, Hat, but I know Slytherin best and you’re most comfortable with what you know, and you’re happiest where you’re comfortable. So, can I go there?"

The Hat doesn’t answer, but it does open its rip wide enough to shout, "SLYTHERIN!" to the whole Hall.

"Cheers!" says Allison, depositing the Hat back on the stool and crossing down to where the Slytherins are applauding. A fourth year who still hasn’t swapped his side-facing cap for his wizard’s hat yet leans over to grab her in some bro-handshake that leaves her a little confused. A couple cousins wave, looking unsurprised.

She turns around to watch the rest of the Sorting. Three girls and a boy join her at the Slytherin table; "Martin, Lydia," keeps making snide comments about the other first years as they go up, which Allison politely ignores because she figures she’s coming down from nerves. The toad boys both go to Hufflepuff -- the second one, whose name seems to be all consonants, so Flitwick mumbles it helplessly like "ghmmph Stilinkski," makes everybody shout laughter by accidentally grabbing Flitwick’s hat instead of the Sorting Hat, as Flitwick and the stool are the same height. Ears bright red, he shoves the real Hat -- considerably more shabby than the other -- over his head and promptly takes it back off to go join his friend.

By the end of the Sorting, "Whittemore, Jackson," becomes the last Slytherin. A prefect frowns sidelong at them and says, clearly audible, "There are fewer of them every year."

Allison blinks, but before she can think about why that unsettles her, the Headmistress stands to address them, and she forgets.

~*

Lydia Martin has auburn hair and very neat nails, and she sizes up all the Slytherin first years over the next week and comes to the executive decision that Allison shall be her best friend, and sets about making that happen.

Before the Sorting Hat started rattling off qualities like a horoscope, the only thing Allison really _knew_ about Slytherin was that it was the House for the best, and therefore the House for Argents (and also, their colors were green and silver, which were, coincidentally, the two most prominent colors in the Argent wardrobe, so that was convenient,) but she thinks that maybe the Sorting Hat sings out House traits with exactly people like Lydia in mind. Either that, or Lydia listened carefully and then molded herself to fit.

Allison’s pretty sure that Lydia’s either a genius, or she’s been doing underage magic behind her parents’ back for a long time before coming to Hogwarts, because by the time they move from theory and safety into beginner’s spellcasting, Lydia barely even needs to try before she succeeds, and spends the rest of class looking bored.

Allison, Lydia, and Jackson Whittemore are the only Slytherin first years who aren’t pureblood, and as such, tend to stick together.

"Muggleborn," Jackson confesses; he’s got a thin, pinched face and too many freckles and a gross habit of wiping his nose in his sleeve, and he doesn’t smile much, like it hurts his face. "Or, a least, adopted by Muggles, so who knows how dirty that makes my blood."

"Don’t be ridiculous," snorts Lydia, spooning porridge into her mouth and flipping to the back of _Standard Book of Spells: Grade 3,_ which she snatched out of somebody’s bag while Allison had them distracted by asking for directions. (She hadn’t had to fake it: she really was lost, although she supposes Lydia wasn’t.)

Jackson sneers back at her, but since Lydia hadn’t bothered to look up at him, she misses it. Allison smiles sympathetically.

"What about you?" he finally asks, coming up behind them as they head down to the dungeons for Potions with Professor Harris. His tone is belligerent, and he scuffs angrily with his feet as they walk. "Why aren’t you invited to sit with the cool kids?"

"We _are_ the cool kids," Lydia interjects, sounding offended at the idea that they wouldn't be. Seeing both Jackson and Allison brighten, she straightens her shoulders and adds proudly, "I’m half-and-half. Like making an alloy or a blended fabric or a mash-up, it’s just more genetically sound to mix. It’s silly to think otherwise, and unbecoming of this House."

Allison never talked about blood status with her parents: it just wasn’t something they were concerned about, so much as what people chose to _do_ with their magic.

 

~*

 

Lydia says that Slytherin is more of a girl house, anyway, and that's why Jackson's the only boy in their year. Girls have to be more ambitious and more cunning than blokes on a daily basis just to survive, so really, it's a good thing there's a Hogwarts house to accommodate that. Allison believes her, because Lydia's going to be the youngest witch to receive the Order of Merlin First Class -- she's going to be, because she says she is.

She doesn't think about what it means for Jackson to be the _only_ Slytherin boy in their year, until Creepy Creevey mentions something about Jackson's friendship with a Gryffindor.

Creepy Creevey isn't _technically_ Slytherin's ghost, but she sees him around a lot more often than she does the Bloody Baron; endlessly curious about the dormitories and the daily lives of its inhabitants, once or twice he's been caught uncomfortably close to the girl's lav, which Allison supposes is where the name "Creepy Creevey" comes from, but mostly she sees him floating around the common room, staring at things, and when she asks him what he's doing, he looks surprised, like it hadn't occurred to him to wonder until she made him wonder about it.

"I wish I had my camera," is what he settles on. "It's like a --"

"I know what a camera is," Allison interrupts, because he seems like somebody who would talk incessantly if not politely redirected.

"Do you?" he seems pleased. "Slytherins are so surprising sometimes!"

"Are we?"

He pauses at that, rotating slowly in midair until he's nearly upside-down without seeming to notice that he's doing it. The greenish light from the windows turns him the same color as garnets, a faint glow around his cheeks. "I guess," he says slowly. "People are only surprising if you have really narrow ideas of what people are. Then they catch you off-guard all the time."

Allison isn't sure what this has to do with cameras, but it might have something to do with the fact that Slytherins aren't traditionally very familiar with Muggle technology.

"The green light's very pretty," she offers, because she thinks that's what he's getting at it.

"Yes, it is," he says wistfully, his hands twitching around a shape in front of his eyes. _Camera,_ Allison thinks, and her heart squeezes itself, a little sad. "I wish I'd know that when I was alive, I would have tried harder to get down here."

Although technically a Gryffindor sixth year, Creepy Creevey is more around Aunt Kate's age, which still makes him the youngest ghost that Allison knows. She thinks. She doesn't actually know how old the ghost is that lives in Aunt Kate's cellar, just that sometimes she gets really angry and it starts leaking out around the edges of the wards, making all the hairs on Allison's arms stand on end and the corners of the room go dark. When her parents go out, they leave an elderly house elf in charge of keeping the ghost down there, because house elf magic is stronger than a wizard's in some ways, but she's old and falls asleep in front of the fire a lot, so Allison's woken up in the middle of the night before to find this horrible, knotted caricature of a woman hovering over her bed, ghostly grey and humming. Her eyes are terrifying. Allison would have expected her to try to escape the instant she had a chance, but she doesn't: she stays right by her side, trying to pet her hair and sing her to sleep like protecting Allison is the only thing she can imagine doing, and she'll stay there until someone arrives to shackle her back down in the cellar.

Allison's starting to think that her experience with ghosts might not be everyone else's experience with ghosts.

 

~*

Jackson Whittemore and Danny Mahealani both make the Quidditch team the following year, becoming their House's respective Keepers. Putting two twelve-year-old boys in front of the goals means that for the first couple matches, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw completely wipe the pitch with them, but the first Gryffindor-Slytherin match lasts for two and a half days because nobody can score and nobody can find the Snitch, and Allison gives up and goes inside to have hot cocoa and hears about it from Lydia, but apparently Headmistress McGonagall had to go out there and cancel the match at the fifty-two hour mark because the fifth years were learning self-Transfiguration and she wanted to have at least one year where nobody got turned into a flower lei, and how could they expect that to happen if none of the fifth years had gotten any sleep?

Allison and Lydia learn not to wait for them afterward, because they'll invariably stay behind on the pitch no matter the weather, where they'll argue in that way that's really just loudly agreeing with each other and fly around until the groundskeeper -- a mean, taciturn wizard named Mr Hale who never makes eye contact with anybody -- comes out to yell at them.

Danny's turning him into a very competitive Chocolate Card collector, Creepy Creevey reports.

"Good," Lydia decides, spelling the ends of her nails a molten gold and then silver and then back to the gold, which she smiles proudly at, fanning her fingers out for them to take a look at. "He could use someone to challenge him."

And maybe it's something about the way people just stop treating Jackson and Danny's inter-House friendship as odd, but when Scott McCall starts booting Stiles's arse off his stool in Herbology to sit next to Allison instead and ask her questions about, like, her favorite colors and stuff, she finds she doesn't mind so much. Without entirely meaning to, she winds up with a very large cache of information on him -- his mother's a Muggle, he wants to take Care of Magical Creatures with Professor Deaton in his third year, and he's going to try out for the Quidditch team until the day they accept him because there's no other way they're going to get rid of him.

"Um, why are you still tolerating that Hufflepuff?" Lydia asks at the start of next term, when Scott walks her all the way to the corridor outside the Slytherin common room for seemingly no reason -- it means he's going to have to backtrack half-way across the castle to reach the Hufflepuff entrance by the kitchens.

She says it in the tone people use when they're saying _what's that?_ about things stuck to the bottoms of other people's shoes.

"I'm fostering relationships outside of my comfort zone to further my own agenda," Allison replies promptly. "And also, he's sweet."

"Sweet," Lydia echoes blankly, like she can't fathom it, and Allison hugs her, quick and overcome with fondness.

Then Scott starts joining them at the Slytherin table at breakfast on the mornings when the Slytherins and Hufflepuffs have double Herbology afterwards.

This, of course, means that Stiles comes too, and Lydia looks horrified.

 

~*

Their fifth year, when Scott McCall tries out for a position on the Quidditch team and fails yet again, Allison doesn't.

"Where have you been hiding these past couple years?" Mr Finstock demands, completely ignoring the way the Slytherin Captain is trying to get him to leave the pitch so she can get on with the rest of the tryouts. "Slytherin's been bottoming out in fourth place for the Quidditch cup for the past five years!"

Behind him, Jackson's face grows even more sour and pinched than usual.

Finstock isn't done. "Your aim is incredible, Argent! Greenburg, if you don't give her the spot as Beater, I'm hexing you to fly crooked next game."

"You can't do that, you're the ref," Greenburg deadpans back. "And I can't announce the position until I've seen all the tryouts, so will you please clear the field?"

"Her aim's always incredible," Scott says loyally, pulling Allison with him back towards the bleachers and leaving Finstock no choice but to follow. "You should see her in Charms, or in Defense Against the Dark Arts, I've never seen her miss a mark, no matter how far away she's standing!" Seeing the look on her face, he tugs on the sleeve of her robes lightly and smiles. "People just don't notice how good you are because Lydia's your best friend."

Finstock eyeballs him. "What are you even doing here, McCall? Finished embarrassing yourself at the Hufflepuff tryouts, so you've come to see if the Slytherins are desperate enough to take you?"

"I've come to support my friends," Scott says blankly.

"Right, of course. Hufflepuff," he says with enough disgust to make Lydia proud.

When she makes the team, the only person who's surprised is her. Danny applauds her from the Gryffindor table when she walks into the Great Hall the next morning, and Erica Reyes and Vernon Boyd -- the Gryffindor Beaters -- immediately swoop upon her to give her exaggeratedly airy kisses like she's royalty. Lydia grabs her hand as soon as she sits down, giving it a fond squeeze. Her grin lights up her entire face, and Allison leans their shoulders together.

 

~*

 

That same year, Allison learns that the ghost in the Argent family cellar is a witch named Talia Hale.

 

~*

"You know, I think you were Sorted into the wrong House."

Isaac Lahey's been hovering at the end of the row for five minutes now; Allison keeps catching glimpses of him in her peripheral vision as she ducks her head over her spellbooks and he pretends to be checking the reference numbers. He still somehow surprises her when he speaks -- she jumps, and the end of the sentence she was writing scratches crookedly down an inch, blotting there. Voices in the library will do that to you.

She looks up at him, scratching at the corner of her parchment with her quill to make sure the tip isn't broken. He picks at the corner of the shelf with his nails and peeks back at her.

She shoves the chair across from her out with her foot.

He's got the kind of face where his ears move when he smiles. She smiles back, because she likes that about him. He's a Hufflepuff from the year below and so she doesn't see him much outside of meals, but he sneaks into Scott and Stiles's dorm to sleep for reasons they don't explain to her, and Allison doesn't ask because it's really none of her business. She assumes it's like how Jackson spends summer hols with the Mahealanis.

"Well, yeah," she agrees. "I know that."

He settles into the chair, pulling his schoolbag around onto his lap. "That you were Sorted into the wrong House?"

"Yeah. You figure it out eventually. It's barmy, innit, Sorting kids when they're eleven?" she shrugs. "How are you supposed to have any grasp of self-identification when you're that age, or have any idea what kind of person you want to grow up to be?"

He watches her the way Scott watches the poisonous creatures that Professor Deaton brings out for the good lessons; unblinking and fascinated.

"The kid I was at eleven is completely different from the person I am at sixteen. If the Sorting Hat was put on my head today, it wouldn't sort me into Slytherin at all. I wouldn't ask it to, either, because I'm not that eleven-year-old. I think that's true for most of us -- we Sort too early."

"Do you think that's intentional?"

"I think it's traditional."

They exchange rueful smiles, because everybody knows how the wizarding world gets about its traditions.

"I mean," Isaac continues. "Do you think maybe we Sort children into houses they'll grow out of on purpose, to drive them to develop relationships with students in other Houses because their own don't fit as well anymore?"

"Maybe," Allison allows. "Out of curiosity, if you think Slytherin isn't for me, then what is?"

Stiles should have been a Slytherin, she thinks. But Scott was Sorted first, and Scott went into Hufflepuff, so really, there was no way Stiles Stilinski was going to let himself go anywhere else. Besides, Lydia and Jackson would have eaten him alive. So maybe Isaac has a point: Stiles had to grow into them before he knew himself well enough to hang out with them and not go barmy.

She kind of expects Isaac to say she belongs in Hufflepuff with them -- him and Scott and Stiles -- so she's surprised when he bares the corner of a smile and shrugs, "Gryffindor, of course."

"Go go Gryffindor," Allison agrees, and laughs when he does.

 

 

**the second tree: a ponderosa pine**

 

Allison was eight years old when her Aunt Kate ran off to become a hunter of Artemis.

But this was around the time she first started attracting the attention of the things that lived beyond the Mist, and her parents pulled up stakes and moved without much explanation, so you'll forgive her for being a little distracted.

 

➸

 

A long time ago, on a very cold evening in a railroad flat in Detroit, a baby was born to a motor worker named Gerard and his wife, the goddess Nemesis. Gerard had washed his hands that day more times than he could count, till his knuckles cracked, red and raw, but he couldn't get all the grease out from underneath his nails, and his hands looked boorish cradling that fragile, newborn thing that kicked at the chill that drafted up through the cracks in the baseboard and _screamed._

"Hand him to me," his wife said, and Gerard did. His nails were black and his skin pulled in new ways from the cuts healing underneath his heavy coat and there was a stir of something in his chest that, forty years from now, will be a horrible, gnawing cancer, but right now felt peculiarly similar to pride.

Nemesis made a cradle out of her arms. Her eyes were a beautiful, godlit blue that she didn't have to hide, not here with him, her pupil burned away into color. She pressed her mouth to the baby's head. Outside, the bare trees shook at each other with a sound like chattering bones.

"I gotta register him with the state of Michigan," Gerard said, shivering. "What're we calling him?"

"Christopher," his wife said easily, and they kissed each other fiercely, delighted and so very pleased with themselves.

As he grew, Chris Argent took more after his father in looks than he did the chosen form his mother took. This time around, she looked black and talked black and if anybody was dumb enough to say a thing about it (and a lot of stupid people did,) they paid for it. She was very good at that, and she taught Chris about fish hooks and nail files, about the uses for dead dogs and potassium chloride, and once when he was seven, they painted their lips with it and then chewed gum, and scared the shit out of his dad when he came home to find them grinning with green teeth and mouths and green spit, because potassium chloride turns green in the presence of alcohol.

If he knew that his mother was a goddess (and he thinks he did,) then it didn't matter.

Around the time he turned ten, she decided to get pregnant again, and this time, she had a baby girl that she and her husband called Katherine.

"Good. I missed having daughters. The women are born leaders in this family, Chris, remember that," she said to him, and showed him how to support Katherine's tiny head. She didn't look much like a leader. She looked like a bean. Chris loved her hopelessly. "You help her, you got that?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Chris, and tilted his head up to receive Nemesis's proud kiss.

His parents argued about whether or not they should send them to Camp Half-Blood when the time came. Chris listened to them yell about it while Katherine played with the Play-Doh, rolling out snake after snake with the determinedness and self-satisfaction of a three-year-old. Someone had told Gerard about it at his wedding, but Nemesis _hated_ the idea of exposing her children to the other gods.

"They won't fit in!" she cried. "I don't fit in! I never fit in, and they're _my_ family, what do you think they're going to do to our babies?"

It was more complicated than that, Chris learns, because she's right, they don't fit in at Camp, and it wasn't because Nemesis herself is considered an Olympian outsider. It was because she loved them. No other god on Olympus had the balls to actually _love_ their children and properly be there for them, always citing some sad bullshit or another. Nemesis loved them and raised them and taught them how to tie their shoelaces and wrap their hands if they were going to get into a fist-fight, and if she and his dad were bothered by the fact that he was going to grow old and she wasn't, then it didn't stop her from marrying him, from kissing him over cheap dinners while Chris and Kate made grossed-out noises. They killed people who cut them off in traffic and laughed about it -- Chris Argent never had any other model for love.

 

➸

 

Allison is almost sixteen years old when her parents tell her they're moving to California. That's about all they tell her, although by this point, Allison's kind of clued in to the fact that whatever the reason is for her parents moving them around all the time, it probably has something to do with their enormous weapons collection. She likes to imagine they deal to black market Renaissance Faires; after all, who else would _want_ battle axes or a heavy, studded mace?

She doesn't worry about it. Her mom and dad do plenty of worrying for her.

What happens to a child of two half-bloods? Does that child become a half-blood too? How many generations does it take to be safe from the things that crawl out of Tartarus?

They're coming from Boise, so it's not bad this time -- not like it was after that fire in Houston, or that one time in Connecticut with that crazy lady with all the sandwiches -- and Allison queues up her iPod and settles against the car window while her mother hands over the keys to the Boise house and her dad finishes last-minute directions with the moving guys. They get into the car and in the lull between songs, Allison hears, low from the front seat:

"What's the verdict?"

And her father scrapes at the stubble on his chin and says, "Chiron says they couldn't get a satyr installed at the school before the cut-off for enrollment."

Her mother's mouth purses, displeased. "So it's up to us to find this kid?"

"How hard can it be, Victoria?"

"You say that, and yet, they're pretty hard to spot until something tries to eat them."

 

➸

 

"What happened in Houston?" Scott blurts out. "I mean," he adds quickly, when she just lifts her head to look at him vaguely. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, sorry, that was a dumb question, I just -- I heard your dad say something. About how he hopes this isn't another Houston?"

Allison draws in a slow breath, using the feeling of it to pull herself in, reassembling. Her hair clings in scraggly clumps across her neck and shoulders, still damp from her shower. The kennel floor beneath her hands is grimy with mop water residue.

She pushes herself to her feet, crossing over to the exam table, letting Scott's patient sniff at her hand before moving in to pet its ears, more to comfort herself than anything. The dog breathes slowly, steadily, in perfect tandem with the way Scott strokes its sides. She meets his eyes, but only briefly; the feeling of how he looks at her is like catching yourself against something too hot after you've been chilled outside for too long.

"I was eight years old," she decides it's safe to say. "When we moved there. It was me, my mom and dad and my aunt Kate, and there was this --" she scratches at her nose. "This little boy who lived across the street."

"I hate him," Scott says instantly. "Did he break your heart?"

Despite herself, Allison smiles. "Scott, we were _eight."_

He spreads his hands, like, _so?_

She almost doesn't say it, and then it becomes impossible not, because Scott's just the kind of person you want to put your secrets into, "And then someone burned his house down and his entire family died." He stills. "We moved shortly after that, so I have no idea what happened to him. I think about it a lot."

"That's awful," he says quietly. "What was his name?"

Allison smiles despite herself. "Leo. He was my best friend and his name was Leo Valdez."

 

➸

 

Miles away, at the only gas station in this stretch of Northern California where the 10% ethanol kind is less than $4 a gallon, Derek Hale grips the gas pump with all the dignity and bearing of a longsword and faces down a frightening opponent: a middle-aged white couple driving an Escalade, who have him expertly boxed in.

"I'm Victoria," says the woman on the right. "Daughter of Ares. This is my husband, Chris, son of Nemesis. We're here as graduates and ambassadors of Camp Half-Blood."

The gas pump clicks under Derek's hand, and without taking his eyes off the Stepfords -- oh, sorry, Argents -- he squeezes very slowly at the pump to eek out just those few drops more of gasoline for the Camaro's tank. With beautiful timing, the total price ticks a neat half-cent over $40. He decides he's going to be proud of that, that almost never happens. 

They look Greek, he decides, and by that he means: they look related.

"I'm Derek Hale," he returns after a long pause. "I'm an acolyte of Lupa, the mother wolf of Camp Jupiter."

Victoria's nonexistent eyebrows hike up her forehead at that. "And you think the half-blood here is yours?"

Derek returns the expression. He has twice the amount of eyebrow she does. "You think he's _yours?"_

There's no answer to that, of course, because the monsters haven't shown themselves and none of the children in town have stood out as particularly strange, so nobody's sure exactly who "he" is. None of them say anything more; slowly, without taking their eyes off each other, they turn back to the driver's side doors of their respective cars and get in.

_Would you like a receipt?_ the gas pump asks nobody, perplexed.

 

➸

 

The sun's gone down and the air cools off rapidly, the warmth stealing off into the woods the way Allison didn't realize it would. She's never lived in this part of California before, so she sits on the hood of Scott's mother's car and tries to ignore the gooseflesh that pimples up her arms. Somehow, Scott's holding her hand -- properly holding it, all his fingers interlaced with hers in a way that Allison can feel in every knuckle. She kind of wants to go back in to the dance, and she also really, really doesn't.

"Oh!" he says suddenly, startling them both. "I have something for you."

She watches as he goes fishing in the pocket of his too-big rental jacket. He emerges with a slip of paper, which he hands over. On it is a phone number with an area code she doesn't recognize.

She holds it up curiously.

He pinwheels his free hand. "I don't know for certain," he tries. "I haven't called to make sure, but I … I have a gut feeling that that's your Valdez. That's Leo."

Allison's chest craters. She breathes around the impact, and the slip of paper trembles in her hand.

"How …" she gets out.

Scott's smile is soft, and his smile is the kind of smile that pulls up every part of his face. "You needed to find him. I don't know if you knew that you needed it, but I'm -- I'm pretty good at giving people what they need. Or at least I try. I think I got that from my mom."

 

➸

 

Stiles Stilinski skids to a halt beside her, killing his momentum so suddenly that he has to pirouette and slam his back up against the lockers or else pitch forward onto his face, and it rattles the entire row. He's clearly bursting with _something_ to tell her, except then he gets a good look at the expression on her face and derails into a very gusty, "Woah, Allison, what's wrong?"

_Nothing,_ Allison wants to say, because that's what her parents always say, especially to people like Stiles: people who are in authoritative positions or people who have parents in authoritative positions. Her parents have never trusted the authorities in their _lives,_ and it's never really occurred to Allison to ask why, although she thinks derision might have something to do with it.

But. "My aunt's coming to visit," she says, tilting her phone at him. The screen's gone dark, of course, so that doesn't help, but the text message is there. She knows it is. It doesn't go away no matter how many times she looks at it.

"… you don't like your aunt?" Stiles extrapolates.

"I love my aunt," Allison corrects. "But I haven't seen her in person since I was eight."

Something like recognition lifts through Stiles's face. "Since the Houston fire?"

She shoots him a look, alarmed.

"Which I know nothing about, Scott didn't tell me anything," he immediately holds up his hands. "I just know that it's a thing that happened, and that's because of like, context clues, and I'm really good at finding out bad stuff, anyone can tell you that."

That is a trend Allison has noticed, yes.

Frustrated, she whirls around and yanks open her locker, throwing her phone down so that it clatters loudly at the bottom amongst her rock-climbing gear and spare index cards for her Public Presentations class. She slams the door shut again and says to her locker number, "I don't know who I'm more mad at, them or me. _Them_ for not telling me -- Mom or Dad or my aunt -- _anything_ about my life or _myself_ for never asking."

"I've always found it's usually a little bit of both," Stiles offers. "Life is full of questions, man. Ask them. That's what I usually do."

"Yeah, and it usually gets you into a lot of trouble," Allison says wryly, and Stiles widens his eyes, like _who me?_

She stops. She looks at him again, feeling a sudden understanding broaden through her like it's uncurling from a stretch.

"You," she says slowly, the way people peel up their band-aids very, very carefully. "Get into a lot of trouble."

"Well," Stiles looks at her, puzzled. "Scott helps, too, you know."

They exchange a rueful look.

"Say," he jumps in before she can trace her strike of inspiration to its conclusion. "Youʻre free after school, right? Because --"

"Not today," she answers absently. "Todayʻs bill-paying day." At his look, she explains with a quick wave of her hand, "My parents are both dyslexic, so Iʻve been helping them pay bills since I was really little. It's quicker, we've found."

"Hey!" He brightens. "Your parents? Really? So am I!"

 

➸

 

"Okay, _fine!"_ He kicks hard, then lets them sink a little bit into the water so he can leverage his shoes off. The absence of their heavy weight dragging back and forth through the water makes it that much easier to tread. He hikes Derek up to get a better grip and grinds out, "Fine, fine, I admit it! I'm a problem child, Iʻve always been a problem child, and no, my dad never sat me down and told me I was a supernatural creature, but you kind of clue in after awhile. Or at least you hope there's a good explanation for why you've got all these attention problems and why words won't stay still. So whatever, fine, shouldn't I be the one getting shot full of venom? If I'm the one you're all after?"

It isn't until later, when Derek gets his motor control back, that he looks at Stiles and says, completely baffled, "I'm not here for you."

 

➸

 

"Me?" 

Standing in the middle of the ring of adults and still covered in a thin film of monster fluids, Scott looks shockingly young, cutting his eyes desperately from one observing face to another. Allison feels almost … embarrassed for him, although she couldn't tell you why, since her chest feels molten with empathy at the same time. She didn't know any of this either, until she had to start watching people die. She wants to go over there and hold his hand. She wants to make that statement: _Allison Argent is on Scott McCall's side._

The woman takes Scott's face between her hands, crouching to do so. She is at least twelve feet tall, her features as strange and immobile as a Roman statue, her limbs not altogether jointed correctly.

"Yes, you," she tells Scott, and something in her voice puts Allison in mind of the way the wheat fields in Kansas would wave in a strong wind; she speaks like a ripple of sunlight, like summer. She's black and her hair's twisted up atop her head in a shape like a cornucopia, but it's in her smile that Allison suddenly spots the resemblance and thinks, _oh, of course they're related._ "I am Ceres, goddess of life and bounty. You are my son."

"I --" Scott's mouth works fishily.

She straightens, putting a hand to his shoulder and turning to Derek. "Tell your mother that I fully endorse him for the legions of Camp Jupiter. I trust he has your protection on the voyage there."

Derek inclines his head, and then grinds out dryly, "That'll be a task."

Ceres smiles in acknowledgement and then turns then to Melissa, who immediately straightens up to her full height, putting her shoulders back and stretching her neck, adopting her most imperious expression.

"My dear," says Ceres fondly.

"… Hi," Melissa offers, awkward and still somehow managing it with great dignity. "It's been awhile."

She releases Scott. As she crosses over to his mother, her form shrinks, her features shifting out of their marble state. "You've done so well," her godlike voice still booms out of her smaller self, her eyes haloed in golden light. 

"Yes, well," says Melissa. "No thanks to you." But when Ceres reaches for her hands, her own twitch out, their fingers closing around each other with the ease of familiarity. She ducks her head, and Allison's close enough to see the painful pull of a smile.

They look back to Scott, now alone in the middle of the circle. He tears his eyes away from Ceres and his mother, glancing quickly over at Derek and then back again.

"Okay," he says carefully. "But what about Stiles?" He catalogues their expressions and elaborates, "If I'm a half-blood, then he definitely is. He said the Romans don't get the same kind of dyslexia because the alphabet's a lot more similar -- I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded important." He looks to Derek. "He's coming too, right?"

"He is not," Ceres says, not without sympathy. "He's a child of the Greek side of my family, and thus must be trained differently."

Her eyes turn, at last, to Allison and her parents. "That's your domain, is it not?"

 

➸

 

"No," says Stiles immediately. "Bro, no, no, no, you've got something mixed up. I mean, I've done my research, right, and Nemesis -- everybody hates her. She's one of the evil goddesses, right?" He looks at his dad, only the faintest furrow between his brows giving away any hint of betrayal.

"She always thought it had more to do with the other gods and goddesses being embarrassed of her, really," Chris Argent leaps in before the sheriff can say anything. "Her existence reminds them of how petty and vindictive they can be, so they'll do anything to discredit her and talk her down -- that way, they can pretend she doesn't have any power over them." It comes out easy with recitation. "She's the goddess of revenge, Stilinski, and revenge by itself is neither good nor evil. Much like people."

Stiles absorbs this, not taking his eyes off his father. He leans in like his presence is a weight he can lever onto the sheriff's shoulders.

"I joined the police academy because I wanted bad things to happen to bad people," is what finally, finally comes out. "I met Nemesis and …"

That's all he seems to want to say, his eyes flicking telltale to the Argents' presence in the room. His throat stoppers over whatever he was about to say.

"But … Mom?" Stiles presses.

"Loved you," the sheriff says instantly. "As if you were her own."

If it's a lie, then he delivers it shamelessly.

Chris steps forward. "Sheriff," he says. "Your son's grown now. Being the offspring of a minor goddess shielded him for a little bit, but now all of Tartarus knows he's here. We have to take him to Camp."

"No," Stiles snaps. "You almost put an arrow in my best friend, I'm not going anywhere with you."

"Son --" starts Allison's father with a bite of impatience.

And Allison hears herself say, "I'll do it."

Everybody looks at her.

She shrugs, "Being a half-blood once removed doesn't seem to have spared me. I see the monsters. I know they're there. I'll escort Stiles to Camp. There, _I_ can get more training," the emphasis is not lost on her father; a muscle in his jaw tightens. The training she has is bare bones, everybody knows that. She can shoot an arrow, big deal.

"Allison …" Surprisingly, it's the sheriff who protests first.

"Besides," she talks over him, grabbing Stiles by the elbow and hooking it firmly through her own. "Maybe I want to spend some time with my uncle."

"Oh my god," Stiles says faintly. "Don't ever call me that."

She smiles at him sideways. "Can you imagine Mr. Harris's face if I did?" He groans, and she continues gleefully, "Or the _Coach's?"_

 

➸

 

Lydia lets herself in while her parents use the two separate landlines downstairs, and there's nothing Allison can do about the fact that her room looks like she's packing up to leave for an extended amount of time. A Quest, her dad calls it. She looks like she's about to go on a Quest. She rolls up her underarmor into a sausage shape, trying to be casual as she tucks them under the flap of her duffel, letting Lydia take everything in.

She does.

Then she says, "You're going to need ambrosia. And at least five golden drachma, what are your parents thinking, haven't they taken inflation into consideration," and the brisk exasperation in her voice makes Allison's heart fracture a little bit.

And then the words sink in.

"Oh, no," she stands and points. "Are you kidding me?"

Lydia's eyebrows tilt upward, and that's the only facial expression she expends any effort to make.

"Don't tell me you're in on it, too." She says nothing, and Allison ticks off her fingers, "My parents came here to poach Stiles, and Derek Hale came here to poach Scott, so who's left for you? Danny? Jackson? Oh, god, is Jackson going to get eaten by something soon?"

Lydia scoffs. She crosses the room and lifts the duffel bag single-handedly, slinging it around to test the weight.

"The cannon balls need to go," she decides. "Also, I'm here to poach _you._ I'm a representative of the Amazons."

 

➸

 

"How did I know the Amazons were going to trying to get their hands on my girl?" Aunt Kate sniffs disgustedly, then hooks her hand around Allison's neck, pulling her in to kiss her temple with a loud, affectionate smack that makes Allison giggle and shove at her. "Those stupid straw feminists."

"Aunt Kate," she admonishes.

They pull away from each other, and she's struck once again by how _young_ her aunt looks, dressed in slim black pants and heavy buckled boots, a silver jacket slung neatly over her shoulders, looking like it'd been plucked straight from the racks at Forever 21. She doesn't look any older than she did last time Allison saw her, that day in Houston. In fact, she doesn't look a _day_ older.

"Look at you," Aunt Kate says quietly, brushing her fingers through the scraggly end of Allison's hair. She doesn't follow it up with anything, like that says it all right there.

"Did you burn down the Valdez's?" blurts out of Allison.

Her eyes double in size, swelling with shock. She starts to take a step back, then reverses direction, immediately dragging Allison into a hug, tight around her shoulders.

"Oh, babe, no," she says. And again, "No. No, I didn't. Is that what you think?"

"What was I supposed to think? They all died and you vanished right afterward and we had to _move_ and Mom and Dad didn't tell me _anything --"_

"Shhh, shh," Aunt Kate brushes her hair off her forehead so that she can kiss it again. "No, baby girl, I didn't burn down the Valdez's. That was … well, it wasn't me. And your parents were hoping that you weren't going to wind up like them. They still hope that, I think, so that's why they didn't tell you about my recruitment."

Later, while Aunt Kate sizes up the projectile points of several arrowheads against each other in the Argents' garage, Allison asks, "You don't mind the celibacy thing?"

Aunt Kate thinks about it for a beat, then pulls a face.

"Not so much, no," she decides. "Men were never really on my level anyway. Giving them up wasn't a hardship."

"Don't you have to be a virgin to join the Hunters, though?"

It's not something she actually wants to know, not really, but it's worth asking.

She smiles over at her. "Virginity is a social construct designed to shame women into a very narrow behavioral pattern," she says easily. "I don't know who you've been listening to, but having sex doesn't make anyone ruined. The Lady Artemis knows that."

She picks an arrowhead and passes it over to Allison, who packs it obediently.

"You know you're more than welcome to come with us if you want to," she says. "We'd love your company."

"Even if --" starts Allison, and stops. She kind of likes the Amazons' idea of it, and if there's anyone more willing to be her servant, it'd probably be Scott. She'd have to talk to him about it first, though, establish boundaries and all that. "Even if I fall in love with Scott?"

Aunt Kate's smile crinkles all the way through her eyes.

"A woman's worth doesn't have an expiration date, babe," she says. "Whenever you want to run with us, just give us the word."

 

➸

 

She sits at the foot of her bed, the folds in her comforter crinkling towards her. A duffel bag sits at her feet. A slip of paper clings to the ends of her fingertips.

She breathes out. She thumbs at the dial button. She lifts her phone to her ear.

It rings.

It rings.

It --

"Hello," a woman's voice chimes out of the other end. "Jackson residence, Sally speaking."

"Hi," gasps out of Allison like a fish flopping itself onto the deck of a boat. In her ear, she can hear the sound of loud voices and the chitchat clatter of metal objects. "Um, I might have the wrong number, but is -- is Leo there, by any chance? Leo Valdez?" She doesn't know what else she should volunteer. _I used to live next door to him until his entire family was murdered._

"Ugh," goes the voice. "Who _isn't_ here right now? Hold on a moment, please."

Her voice distances itself from the receiver.

"Hey, is one of you lot a Leo? No, Coach, I'm not talking about astrological signs, I'm -- oh, hey, you? Yeah, there's a girl on the phone for you, here."

And then --

"Hello?"

 

**the third tree: a california redwood**

 

In the aisle with the teas and hot cocoa mix and canisters of ground coffee, Allison holds up a thing of Tollhouse and asks, "What's your opinion on creamer?"

Scott considers it, taking it from her and flipping it over to read the nutrition facts. His breath smells like the goat cheese sample he snuck back in the deli meat aisle, his clothes like (unscented, what a joke) detergent and cotton blend, and underneath it all, there's the familiar scent of happy pack -- something she could never really describe, just that it's … _comfortable,_ almost, and far better than anything she can find in the Yankee Candle section.

"We never had it in our house," Scott says, and Allison files that tidbit of information away in the compartment of her heart labelled with Scott's name. "We always used milk as creamer, because Mom wanted us to get calcium whatever way she could, and I think she was afraid that if she ever introduced creamer into our house, we'd never go back."

She digests this, nudging her shoulder into his chest and unconsciously shifting him into her beta position.

Then she sticks the creamer in the cart.

Scott widens his eyes at her and covers his mouth in faux-shock. "Rebel wolf," he whispers, and she rolls her eyes and starts off down the aisle again. "We have a rebel wolf here!"

"Oh, shut up," she returns, as he jogs to catch up to her. "I just want to see what it tastes like. We can form our own habits now."

She's looking for it, so she spots the exact moment his expression softens with understanding. He closes his hand over hers on the push bar, and she's a werewolf, okay, she can still steer with one hand and hold onto his with the other, no problem.

At the checkout, when the cashier asks them if they found everything they needed, Scott puts his hand on Allison's back and says, "This is my wife," like that's a perfectly legitimate answer. He _beams_ through his sentence, his voice hitching noticeably on the word _wife,_ and the cashier hikes her eyebrows back, flipping a pack of AA-batteries over and scanning them through.

She looks to Allison, who puts her checkbook down in order to show the ring on her finger. "We just got married," she mumbles around a mouth that feels beestung with the joy of it.

And the cashier is young, and sweet, and if there are wolves howling around her door, then she's able to forget about them right now, because the smile she gives them is genuine, full, and bares all of her teeth. She says, "Congratulations."

And the McCalls say, in unison, "Thank you."

 

-

 

The creamer has little bits of peppermint in it, ground into bone-fine powder. It crackles when they pour hot coffee over it.

They still add a dash of milk anyway, watching the color of it bloom and swirl on through when they stir. In their little apartment that overlooks the parking lot and a glimmer of clear blue Montana sky through the gap between the buildings, Scott wraps his arms around her, pinning her against the sink and putting his mouth to the back of her neck, forgetting, she thinks, that to wolves, that's a sign of dominance. She tolerates it, and he rolls his mouth against the nape of her neck and asks, "Do werewolves even need calcium? Like, will your bones be less strong if you don't drink it? Could you even get osteoporosis?"

"Scott," she chides, and passes him a cup over her shoulder. "How should I know?"

 

-

 

That weekend, Scott's organization hosts a wine-and-cheese party, since it's the end of the year and everybody's suddenly remembering how charitable they _haven't_ been and scramble through the months of November and December to cobble together enough donations to declare on their taxes the following year. He works for St. Vincent de Paul as an outreach coordinator, which he says is basically just guilting people into acting like humans, and the wine-and-cheese party is a necessary evil designed for their comfort: they can hang out with other people like them without having to confront the … messiness of the people their money goes to. Everybody at St. Vincent hates it.

Scott and Allison go and hold hands the entire time and stand against the wall and don't really talk to anybody.

"You know, I don't know anything about you guys," says Julie when she finally interrupts them. She shares real estate with Scott in the cube farm and steals his stapler a lot. Allison smells three children on her, whole-grain bread, an aunt who smokes, and someone (not her) who'd had sex in the back of her car earlier that day. "Your background or anything. It's like you just materialized out nowhere. I've never heard you talk about anybody but each other."

Scott presses closer to Allison, instinctive. She looks up at him, reading the signals in his body.

"We're from California," he drops out, tangling their left hands together behind their bodies, the angles awkward and their rings hard against each other. "We met in high school."

"Why … here?" she gestures.

"We killed a man in Reno just to watch him die, and now we're on the run," Allison deadpans, and Julie rolls her eyes.

"All right, Bonnie and Clyde. Enjoy the party."

They skip out early instead, making out in the parking lot for five minutes under the waning moon before they get in their car and go home. Allison scrubs her make-up off in the bathroom and gets as far as peeling her nylons off before she grabs a bottle of wine out of the laundry cupboard and gets into the bathtub, dress pooling on the non-skid patches. Scott comes in about five minutes later and promptly gets into the tub with her, pulling her feet into his lap and rubbing gently at the imprints her boots left in her ankles. Allison wears steel-toed construction boots to fancy dress parties, these days.

"Hello, wife," Scott murmurs, leaning across the space to touch their jaws together. He noses at her the way wolves do.

She catches his face, holding him still so that she can fill her nose with his scent. She kisses him with glacial slowness. "Hello, husband," she returns into his mouth, and he moans, soft.

 

-

 

They've talked about giving Scott the bite, because what's an alpha without a pack? And it's not that Allison won't age and that he will, it's that aging won't break down at Allison the way it will Scott, won't weather her away like wind and rock, and she gets nervous every time she slows down and thinks about how easily something could happen to him. Humans heal so incredibly slowly. They're never as strong as they were the day before.

Once a week, they get into the car and drive to another part of the state -- in the spring, Allison rolls down the driver's side window and howls at the patches of pure Montana wilderness as they sail through it, at the slow-melting ridges of snow and the scent of growing things and the distant specks of clustered homes. They find somewhere they've never been and Scott calls home from a payphone, listens to his mother complain about the California cost of living and ungrateful sons who elope and don't even give her the opportunity to cry unattractively at a wedding. It's her way of saying she'll all right.

If somebody really wanted to track them down, she's pretty sure they could: they cover their tracks enough to say they don't want to be found, but not enough that they can't be, if necessary.

If Scott wanted to go home, he could.

But she can't set foot on Hale territory, and so he won't, either. He's her beta, with his blunt teeth and breakable nails and the scent of soup kitchens in his palms, and he goes where she goes.

 

-

 

It happened because she went for a jog.

And you know what they say, about women who jog alone. Wanda Sykes did some kind of comedy skit about it, didn't she; don't you wish you could just go for a run and leave your body behind, because it's like as soon as you step outside, it belongs to whoever sees it? There's nothing that people feel deserves quite as much comment as the female body.

And here's the story: Allison Argent went for a jog alone in the woods.

And, because this is a story about a woman who went for a jog alone in the woods, something happened.

 

-

 

Scott gets up on the stepladder to change light bulbs and waters the plants -- the fleshy leaves of their jade are red-tinged with health, and their Christmas cactus never blooms, because Christmas cactus only blooms when it thinks it's going to die -- and does the laundry, because only he cares how it smells. Allison cooks and hangs out the window to break off the icicles from the gutters and drives over to the insurance office whenever there's a statement they don't understand.

The state of Montana is divided up between two very large, established packs, but Allison skirts their territory and carves out a narrow section for herself. It includes two miles of low brushland and approximately five blocks of town, which just so happens to cover a McDonalds, so all in all, she's pretty happy with the arrangement. She buys beeswax in great clumps from the man who washes dishes at the Thai resturaunt on Bills Ave and makes candles that she sells online. She has Scott sniff them to make sure they're at a level humans can comprehend, and the online reviews praise her for the subtle transitioning between scents.

She misses the Hale woods somedays, because she's a wolf and the smell of green is in her bones, rich and oxygenated and earthy. Her hands itch with want for loamy forest mulch under her paws.

In this part of Montana, the hard-packed dirt breaks her claws.

She married Scott McCall in a town on the very edge of Hale territory, a few short days after he turned twenty, so there weren't a lot of gifts for them to choose from, since everybody had already given him something on his birthday a couple days before. There was no community center to hold a reception in, so they rented out the bowling alley instead: Lydia and Jackson played competitively against the rest of them for a turn or two before getting bored and taking over a lane at the very end (past the young family with an ungainly five-year-old and a newborn who weighed less than the balls, who smiled over briefly but didn't know they were in the middle of a werewolf wedding,) where they struck out more and more violently in what Allison assumed was just their version of foreplay. Isaac was the only one of Derek's betas who came, and Scott unconsciously positioned himself between him and Aunt Kate the entire night.

"What is she doing here?" he hissed at Scott during the initial bustle of everyone grabbing food. He must have known that Allison could hear him.

Scott didn't ask who.

"She saved our lives," he said shortly. Stiles elbowed in between them, effortlessly knowing he was needed. The Sheriff had come with him; he hung back, in a suit that Allison could scent the decades-old taste of a crematorium on, with a tie that had yellow polka-dots, and looked about with a faint air of confusion until he realized that no, neither Mr. and Mrs. Argent nor Mrs. McCall were going to be in attendance. Then he pulled his phone out and took about a hundred pictures.

Allison and Scott had a cake with three tiers on it, and they fed each other a piece -- nicely. Allison dragged the last bit of frosting off his thumb with her teeth.

 

-

 

The first people she told were her parents, because she'd never kept anything from them. Why would she?

She came home with her side torn open, holding her shirt to her body, and stood in the foyer with blood dripping down her leg and sobbed _"Mommy"_ when Victoria came, alert the way mothers are when their children's feet land on the step wrong, when something is amiss. The plate she was holding fell from her hands, ceramic shattering.

They called Aunt Kate, who was in Idaho training up the next generation of hyper-violent masculine drop-outs with visions of zombie-apocalypse heroics dancing in their eyes. She was there within twelve hours, just as the wound puckered into a faint pink mark along Allison's ribs. She locked herself in the dining room with Chris and Victoria, and Allison could hear every word: "the code" came up a lot, and a loyal "fuck the code" from Aunt Kate, along with "you're going to have to start distancing yourself from her, starting now, or you'll just make yourself a target," and, of course, the word "werewolf."

In the morning, Aunt Kate kissed her forehead and told her she was staying home from school. There was something they needed to tell her.

It was Aunt Kate who taught her how to be a weapon. She helped her adjust to her new senses, her hearing and smell and balance and the speed with which she healed. She coached her through her first full moon, standing over her with a shotgun as the feeling of it bent at Allison's bones, like rice scattered through her blood, swelling. She wanted to tear her own limbs off. She wanted to howl.

"How do you know so much?" she asked Aunt Kate when the sun rose and her mouth shrunk back to normal size. "I thought your job is to hunt werewolves, not know what it's like to be one."

She spat buckshot onto the cement floor.

Aunt Kate helped her up.

"All women have wolves in them, babe," she said. "Now, let's talk about the trap we're going to set for the fucker who bit you."

 

-

 

"You have to choose," Peter Hale had told her, so smug and pleased with himself. "Just who it is who's going to die tonight. Will it be your mother? Your father? Your precious Scott? Which of your friends is going to have to die, little wolf? You better pick wisely."

Allison curled her lip at him in disgust, because _really?_ "Yeah," she said slowly. "How about not?"

You know what they say, after all, about men who go after women who jog alone at night.

Well, no you don't, because nobody ever talks about men like that.

Trust me, they're insects. They squash. Their guts go everywhere when they do.

Allison couldn't have done it by herself; she had Aunt Kate, she had Lydia and Scott, she had Stiles. Derek Hale came and challenged her claim as alpha, and Allison let him have it. Why wouldn't she? It was his land, and she could give it to him without him having to slit her throat for it. Honestly, it's like nobody's ever contemplated any alternate method. No wonder her parents keep telling her werewolves are dangerous. They're steeped in tradition, in ritual.

That's always dangerous.

 

-

 

In the spring, a visitor arrives.

"Alpha McCall," says Isaac. His eyes are blue and horrible. "I think I'm in need of a pack."

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
